(maint) Fix major performance regression in Puppet specs

• This one seemingly innocuous change resulted in an increase of spec run time from 20 minutes to 2 hours on Win2003R2 and a series of type conversion errors in specs on Win2008R2 that it has been theorized are a result of memory pressure exerted by the change. This has also caused slowdowns across the boards in other specs, and more diagnostic work is being performed to determine the root cause.
• For now, this change is being merged as it clears out a number of CI issues that we're experiencing.